Somebody Named Eric

• Hoover Dam
• Castel St. Angelo in Rome
• The Roman Forum in Rome
• A villa outside Tuscanny

The photosynth site also allows you to place your photosynths on a map using Virtual Earth, which is pretty cool.

Very cool!

So, I had some meetings in RedWest today and since I biked in this morning I took my bike from 119. I've become a big fan of bike commuting in the last few months, it actually only takes 5 mins door to door vs. 15 (including parking) in a car.

I was on the sidewalk of 148th just crossing 51st when it happened. Two guys I know from work were walking along the sidewalk, I won't say who they are, but their names rhyme with Tike Morres and Lave Daw. So, as I approached them I politely called out "pardon me gentlemen*" hoping they would make room for me to carefully and respectfully bike past.

They pretended to move out of the way, only to push me into the gravel as I went by**, spilling me head first onto the pavement, luckily, I caught myself on my hands and wasn't injured. No thanks to them.

The first thing they said as I went down was "one GPM down, one to go***." Then grudgingly they helped me to my feet and seeing that I wasn't going to expire on the spot they asked if I was ok.

Let me pause for a moment and talk about my feelings. I wasn't surprised by this behavior from Tike, after all, I watched him try to knock off MC 7 or 8 times. But apparently poisoned coffee didn't work. Neither did dressing up as a hairdresser. Nor did that whole bowling ball under the mini trick. He even struck out with the old "push a safe off a ledge onto his head." Of course, it is odd that we haven't seen MC in a long time... maybe Tike finally succeeded.****

But I really was surprised that Lave would do this. He's always struck me as a nice guy. He listens and nods politely when I give feedback on the profile. And he shows up to meetings that I call. Maybe it was because they were in a hurry to shotgun some beer and have a slushy at the 7-11 - or at least that's what they said.*****

So, the moral of this story is:
- wear your helmet
- watch your back, PM leads are vicious
- always have piero take a sip of your coffee before you drink it
- somebody should figure out if MC is alive
- anybody seen Jeff lately?

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*What I really said was "God damn pedestrians"
**Actually, I just rode into the gravel and fell down. No I don't need to wear a helmet (except that I was).
***This is true, although they said it later after they were sure I was ok
****This is true too. Ok, it's not, but it sounded good.
*****Actually, they said they were on their way to have lunch at the Pro Club, but I think my story is more plausible.

One of the challenges of setting up the house to be a good zoo was allowing access to the kitties for head-sitting at night, without allowing Solomon night access to terrorize the house, eat clothes and go get the bitches pregnant (ok, that's wishful thinking, he's neutered and plus I think he's gay).

So, the solution to this dilemma was to put in a little cat door to allow the cats ingress and egress while keeping the dog confined. After much discussion and some really bad suggestions about putting the kitty door in the door to the room, I decided the easiest thing would be to cut a hole in the wall and put a little hobbit-esque door there.

Initially, I had some problems because my stud-sensor (really, that's what it's called) thought that there was an electrical line in the way, but I decided it was lying and so pulled out the handy dandy sawzall and chopped a hole to see what was up. Turns out that the sensor was wrong and there were no issues... except one little tiny problem...

The cats are huge. They're like small dogs or big children (not big as in american-style-chicken-mcnugget-eating-xbox-playing-fatass-don't-know-what-the-word-exercise-means kids, I mean big children like how the french make them).

So Sam measured Jake and he is 12 inches high and 9 inches wide... so that's how big I meant to make the hole. But I sort of screwed up and made the holes offset a little bit... so had to widen the whole thing to make room. No biggie, I thought. Well, a few days later, we realized that there was one tiny little problem with this... check it out...

Oops. 85 pounds of chocolate lab apparently fit through a 10 inch wide and 12 inch high hole. Time to remodel the hobbit door...

Sam's kitties moved in a few weekends ago, marking the beginning of the end of single life... the first week was a bit rough for the zoo... Solomon (85 lbs) thinks that kitties are fun to play with and likes chasing them. Jake (21 lbs) growls and pees himself a bit whenever Solomon chases him. Elwood (a svelte 19.5 lbs) hisses and runs away.

The cats are excited to have a backyard again, after being cooped up in a little Queen Anne apartment for a year.

After a week or so, the kitties and the puppy are starting to mellow out. There have even been a few nights that we've had 2 of the inmates in bed with us... although Elwood seems to think it's funny to sit on your head and purr when you're sleeping... that's not so fun.

Meanwhile, does anybody know of a place to buy animal wipes in bulk? Jake is going through them like hotcakes.